With the proliferation of computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, users are enjoying numerous different mechanisms and interfaces for inputting text, including standard keyboards, virtual keyboards, voice recognition applications, and touch-sensitive input areas. Devices that include such touch-sensitive input areas are able to receive handwriting input from a user, which is then recognized by the device as corresponding to text characters. Furthermore, after a user has input several characters in the handwriting area such that the user is unable to input additional characters, the user has to perform a variety of different clearing operations to clear the handwriting area in order to be able to continue to provide input in the handwriting area. These clearing operations can significantly slow down a user when the user is inputting text to an application executing on the device.